Advice for Italian Boys (22 page)

“Here’s what I think,” Nicolo said. “Frankie may not be as natural as you’d like, but he really can sing and it could be that that’s what the people who buy tickets are coming for. Maybe you could work with what he is, instead of fighting it. That’s what I try to do, with the people I train, even you.
I have to work with the people I get. There’s no point trying to get you to do a Pilates class, for example.”

“I could do Pilates.”

“That’s all I have to suggest. And faith. Maybe you have to have more faith in Frankie. There was a guy they taught us about in high school, one of those Greek philosophers. I forget his name. What he said was that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows just one big thing. I didn’t understand it then, but I think I do now. Frankie’s like the hedgehog. This thing he does, singing the way he does, that’s his one big thing. I don’t think you’re ever going to make him into a fox.” Nicolo was thinking as he spoke of himself and Zoe, how he was more like Frankie while her mind was more like the mind of a fox. He didn’t know if this was fatal or not to whatever might be built up between them. He felt it might be, but he wasn’t sure. He thought of his mother and father, his brother Enzo and Mima, Mario and Angie. The men were each hedgehogs, he was pretty sure of that. But the women were, all of them, much more like the fox. Their minds were divided more intricately, with facets that it could take a lifetime to understand.

A
lthough Nicolo was gone for only three days, Filomena had been unsettled with him so far away from the house. She had not fully understood where he had gone or why. She had been told that he had gone to the United States, for work, somewhere warmer, drier, and she had formed the impression that he was in Florida. When a satellite image of Florida’s jutting peninsula appeared on the screen during the evening weather report, she tried to interpret what the depiction of air systems eddying above the state portended—storms or sun or showers. She raised her right hand in a benediction that she believed had the power to diminish any spiralling storms because the strong North American God of the television set would see that
it was so important to her, and this act eased her fear that Nicolo would be beset or harmed in some way.

A few nights after Nicolo returns home, after everyone is asleep, Nonna rises from her bed at three in the morning, goes along the hall and opens the door to his bedroom. She gazes at what she can make out of him in the darkness, a large recumbent form, breathing steadily. She imagines that she can perceive the steady workings of the thoughts underpinning his dreams like the foundation of a well-built house.

In the dark and silent house, Filomena manoeuvres by sound and by feel. She can see in the dim light only enough to avoid the stairs and other hazards. She has to take extra care, though, because she is subject in these hours to aural and olfactory hallucinations. Wandering from room to room she hears, distantly but distinctly, the tones of the church bells of Arduino’s three churches—Sant’ Agata’s twin bells, which were poorly cast and clanged like cowbells, San Giuseppe’s, which were sonorous, dense, deliberate and measured, and Santa Catarina’s, which were cracked in the fire of 1911 and so warbled and echoed like roosting doves.

At midnight, in the first half-hour of light sleep, she had started from her bed, hearing the voice of her stepmother, Annalaura, calling to rouse her to fetch wood for the stove. A car passing outside in the last slushy puddles on the street leaves in its wake the soft sound of her father’s footsteps on the dry dirt path. She turns to rise and in the fabric of her sheets she smells her husband’s neck when he came in from the fields—salty, dirty, musty. The husband who came to her from Monte di Dio, one village over, a village you could see from the road that led out of Arduino, on the crease of a fold
of the landscape eight kilometres to the west. She had hoped to marry someone from far away, she had longed for a true
straniero,
but Peppino was the one who came along when she was twenty and most wanted to get out from under Anna-laura’s thumb.

She sits on the edge of the bed and rubs her temples. She had taken her chance, a leap of faith, and had learned to love him over the twenty-seven years of their marriage, a little more every year, a steady increase, like coins accumulating in a bank. He had no extra words and few stories, but he was more solid than the earth. He rose in the morning to work and went to bed only when darkness prevented him from working any longer.

She brushes her knuckles across her eyes and smells the bread in the village’s central oven, and then comes the memory of the village moon, which was entirely different in her youth from the moon of today: its surface was the round face of a woman baking bread, a visage streaked with flour and ashes and glowing with the reflected heat of the sun’s oven. All that bread. All those women. Cousins and friends and aunts and grandmothers and godmothers. So many opinions. All that advice, almost none of it any use to her here, where she, untethered, is forced to imagine herself into being over and over every moment. It is exhausting. There are no reference points. She was wise in Arduino, but poor. Here she is rich, and unneeded. Even she can see that passing on the old ways to her grandsons is a waste of her breath. So little of it will be of any use to them. Not to piss into the wind. When to plant and when to reap. The portents of the sun and moon and stars. How to mollify wolves and overlords
and priests. She is worse than Father Bem in his enormous church addressing his ever-dwindling flock. They are both passing on the old stories to people whose ears are blocked by their complicated, modern lives. Except Nicolo. Nicolo listens. More than that, he understands—some of it anyway. She has felt him reverberate in the way she intends, like a bell first absorbs and then sends out the message that the ringer conveys up the rope to the top of the steeple. The other two mystify her. They are so out in the world, and just what they do out there baffles her. Nicolo is more straightforward. A good boy. A good man.

After she has inspected her sleeping grandson and is satisfied, Filomena feels her way with her hands along the walls back to her room. She lays her head on the pillow and tries to imagine that her husband Peppino’s head is on the pillow next to hers, that the faint throb of her blood in her temples is his heart beating as he sleeps. She twists her body in the bed to find a position that has no pain or loss in it, and makes of her many thoughts a kind of quilt to draw over herself—the scent of anise, the way Peppino’s laundered shirt smelled when he pulled it over his head, her love for her grandsons and her great-grandchildren—and then she falls into sleep, notwithstanding the recollection of a random scrap of Annalaura’s sour advice—
Si cientu anni vò campare i fhatti tue t’ha de fhare
—If you want to live a long life, don’t poke your nose into other people’s business. Annalaura is thus reduced to this, a small perforation at the edge of Filomena’s letting go of consciousness. There is satisfaction in the fact that she has always found a way to do the opposite of whatever Annalaura advised.

Nicolo was awake, but he took care to keep each breath deep and slow so that Nonna would be reassured, and would return to her bed to sleep. He heard her sometimes, wandering through the rooms of the house at two or three or four in the morning. He had guessed that she more fully inhabited these small, easily overlooked hours than the daytime hours when the rest of the family was up and active. Nonna’s world was as small here as when she lived in a village of fewer than six hundred souls. Smaller, in fact. In Arduino, Nonna knew everyone, and their history, talents and relationships besides. She knew the language and its intensity and nuances. She was known in return—that slender, headstrong girl with her fine head and untied hair, daughter of Italo and poor Rina, bane of Annalaura, a hard worker but only when she put her mind to it.

Nicolo took several minutes to fall back to sleep, and he filled this time thinking about what he needed to do to navigate the days ahead, which held, in addition to a return to work, a wedding, an important meeting, an examination and then another wedding.

The wedding of Monica’s ex-husband Gordon to Hayley would take place on Saturday. The meeting—Enzo’s hearing with the dean of the law school—would take place at the law school on the following Monday.

The examination would be the final in his psychology class. His study group included Carla, who was funny and
bright but disorganized and so tended to pull the group off track, and two others, both of them keeners as Enzo had recommended. The group had met and dissected the exams from several years past, turning them inside out to determine how they were constructed so that they could see where it would be possible to slot in the facts and concepts they had learned. Many of the problems repeated themselves in different guises from year to year, which was helpful, but this could also be a trap because each year subtle and deceptive changes were introduced that could easily be missed.

The final exam would be closed book and multiple choice, and Professor Werner had spent the final hour of lectures giving the class advice.

“Remember, I will include a number of alternative but wrong answers, which I will nonetheless strive to make as appealing and plausible as possible. You must deeply understand your material, not just learn it, but understand it, in order to resist being seduced by the incorrect answers.” Professor Werner wrote
UNDERSTAND YOUR MATERIAL
on the blackboard and underlined the words twice.

“When the time comes, you may want to work through the exam and answer all the questions you can answer readily, and then come back to the ones you couldn’t answer on the first go-through. If you really do not know the answer, remember that, unlike in what is often quaintly referred to as ‘real life,’ you won’t be penalized for being wrong. Even a guess has a twenty-five percent chance of being right. For every wrong answer you are able to eliminate, your chances of guessing the correct answer from among the remaining choices goes up. You should try to eliminate as many as
you can so that you can make your final guess from among as small a number of alternatives as possible. Once you do decide on an answer, think twice about changing it. Many people believe that you should avoid changing an answer unless you have a good reason to do so. Sometimes, it is thought, our first instinct that may be our best.”

Enzo’s lawyer, Salvatore, would go with him to the meeting with the dean, and Nicolo would go too, but he’d been told that he would have to wait outside the inner office where the interview would be held. Any job offers had been withdrawn and the matter of discipline left to the law school. The accused students had been allowed to attend classes while evidence was being gathered, opinions and legal and quasi-legal demands and questions exchanged, and the governing processes determined. This part of the proceedings was finally complete and the hearings would determine the next step—and only just in time. Enzo’s final exams were two weeks away. With misgivings but without much discussion, he and Enzo had decided not to tell their parents about the problem. Mario had brought up a news article about the investigation over coffee the Saturday morning after Nicolo returned from Las Vegas, but Nicolo had deflected him by turning the topic to the hockey playoff chances.

Nicolo had, however, told Zoe, whom he had seen almost every day since he got back. She had not provided any opinion about the matter. She had a habit unfamiliar to Nicolo of keeping her assessments to herself.

“Maybe you’re just not a judgmental person,” Nicolo suggested, a statement that he realized might apply to himself. They were walking south on Beta Street, from
Nicolo’s parents’ house, where they had eaten lunch, to the Trapassos’, a distance of five kilometres, an inviting walk in this last week of April.

“Oh, I judge, all right,” Zoe said. “I have some fairly strong views on things. You just haven’t heard them.”

“So what do you think, then? They could expel him, you know. His lawyer says that’s within the range of options.”

“I can’t say. I only know his side of the story and how it has affected him. Obviously I’m on his side, but even if I weren’t, I’m not in any position to weigh all of the factors. The people who run the law school, for example, they have something at stake too. They need to protect its name and reputation.”

“So they might take a hard line.”

“Didn’t your guy, the lawyer your brother hired, say that it will be a question of balancing the interests out?” Zoe reached for his hand and squeezed it. “I think that’s what they’ll do. Everyone will want to find some reasonable middle ground.”

Nicolo had kept her hand in his. He hoped she was right, that middle ground would be secured, and that it would be a place from which Enzo could take his next step forward.

Nicolo heard the creak of Nonna’s weight sinking into her mattress, and then another series of small sounds as she settled. He turned from his right side to his left, drew three descending breaths and fell back into sleep.

Nicolo had put the Fells out of his mind over the past few days and so the sight of the brother and sister waiting for him at the gym on Wednesday morning at the usual time and in their usual place, hovering moistly in a dim corner at the far side of the room, caused him mixed feelings, all of them negative. Mainly he felt frustrated that they hadn’t after all switched to a different instructor, someone better matched to what he had come to see as their somewhat obsessive needs—as, he realized now, he had hoped they might do. He was also anxious: the last time he saw them, it had occurred to him that they might take some step to express their disapproval of his absence.

“Why don’t you tell me what you did over the last week instead of our sessions,” he suggested as they walked along the corridor toward the smallest and least frequented of the exercise rooms, the one they preferred.

Bella opened her mouth. “Busy at work—” she began, but Phil scowled and made an abrupt downward, chopping motion through the air, interrupting her.

“We find it to be advisable to keep our personal activities private,” he said.

Nicolo pressed his lips together, nodded, and led them into the otherwise empty room and over to the mats.

“Let’s begin with one of the stretches that we were starting to work on last week,” Nicolo said. He rose up on his toes, raised his locked hands over his head and then reached with one hand back toward the wall behind him. “Push your right hand against the wall and turn your body like this, to the left, keeping your arm slightly bent. This will help to open up the muscles of your chest.” Nicolo straightened,
walked around Bella and positioned himself between them.

Bella craned her neck around him to see what Phil was doing.

“Very good,” Nicolo said, turning to her. “A neck stretch. Phil, can you see how Bella is reaching up and out with her neck. We can easily modify that into a complete neck roll, like this. First, lift your head up and then let it drop around and down and up, and then back.”

Both Fells made sharp, dipping, darting motions with their chins.

“Well, that’s a start,” said Nicolo. “Why don’t we leave that for now and come back to these stretches later. For now I think we should give the balls a try.” He corralled and rolled two of the largest exercise balls, one pink and one purple, over to the brother and sister. “These will allow us to work on both our stretches and our balance at the same time. These are also excellent for strengthening isolated muscle groups.”